[lug] ssh compression

[Bear Giles]

> The bandwidth that it is consuming is killing me.  Is there any way to
> throttle it down?  Would using the compression option in ssh help me or
> hurt me (the man page says it would slow it down, but I don't know if
> that means less bandwidth, longer download or same bandwidth, longer
> download).

It takes computing power to compress and decompress the data stream,
but unless your system is heavily loaded you'll almost always have
faster transmissions with compression than not with reasonably modern
hardware and anything under T1.  If you were doing this on a 100 Mbps
LAN, compression might not be worth the trouble.

Alternately, you could create a compressed tarball on your mail server
and just copy that through the tunnel.

Bear